The pattern goes like this:  a company department lobbies for an enterprise mobile app, and the company commissions one to be built, or acquires a software platform to build it.

More often than not, that first app was internal—a business-to-employee or B2E app carrying out an important function like giving sales people access to information from a customer relationship management system. The app works well, salespeople are more productive, and there is a sense of mission accomplished within the group and those involved within IT. But the rest of the company hasn’t really experienced the advantages of a good B2E mobile app.

The benefits of these first apps tend to be departmental, and run the risk of becoming silos. Fortunately, in many companies, other groups learn about a useful mobile app, and soon want one of their own.

If the company used a mobile app platform to create their first B2E app, they have the foundation to efficiently build one for another group—let’s say the field service team. Before long, the IT and company leadership realize they have the tools to efficiently build, revise, and manage all sorts of mobile apps. For companies that opted for a solid mobile app platform, this can be a bit of an Aha moment. They realize they have a repeatable advantage at their disposal.

We’ve often seen users of our mobile app development platform start with a B2E app for sales, and before long, they’ve built one for channel partners, for customers who want access to their history or account information, or even customer-facing apps that don’t touch the product, but make the consumer’s life easier while enhancing the brand. These companies understand that with the right foundation in place, the only real limit on mobility is the creativity put into the business purpose for each app.

In short, don’t let your first forays into mobility be one-off efforts. To get the most from mobility, look to exploit the mobile platform you have in place from the start. Those same sorts of platform features that will help you build that first app efficiently—configuration-based development without coding; one foundation that generates native code for multiple devices—will support a much broader mobile initiative.

We want to see more companies reach that breakthrough point where they realize they have a foundation that puts few limits on what you can do with mobility. And once you begin rolling out apps, there is a snowball effect in that you get more and more feedback from users, and are better able to pinpoint the business purpose for your next round of mobile apps.

Are you getting into mobility with one specific app as your goal, or do you have a whole series of apps in mind?

Christopher P. Willis is chief marketing officer at Verivo.

We hear about challenges like mobile security. We hear about privacy concerns. And companies that wish to empower employees and better serve customers via mobility face the challenge of rapidly developing apps for multiple device platforms.

What do you think are the biggest concerns in enterprise mobility? Tell us what you think.

Parna Sarkar-Basu is vice president of Marketing Communications for Verivo.

As a leading manufacturer of photovoltaic (PV) solar modules and provider of solar solutions, First Solar’s ongoing goal is to create value-driven renewable energy solutions that protect and enhance the environment. With the right mobility strategy in place, First Solar is now better positioned to reach this goal and stay ahead of its competitors.

Here’s what Jay White, mobility architect at First Solar, has to say about using a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) and why he chose to leverage a mobile platform to drive the company’s enterprise mobility initiative.

“I knew coming into this role at First Solar that I wanted to bring a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) into the picture for two or three main reasons, the first of which is device abstraction. I didn’t want to have to worry about the device because anybody who’s around this industry, even tangentially, has seen and will continue to see that devices change every day. And, the device that everybody has to have today, nobody’s heard of it tomorrow – and then there’s a brand new device. I wanted a MEAP in large part to give me protection against device change.

I also wanted to avoid having to have a stable of developers for every platform — Objective C for the iPad and iPhone, Java and J2ME for BlackBerry devices, .NET for the Windows Devices and so on. I saw a MEAP as a way of providing a “write once and deploy to many devices” solutions. In fact, that was one of the primary factors on my scorecard when I went looking for a vendor to work with.

The last reason was simply that I wanted a configuration based solution versus a coding-based solution.  I wanted to focus my efforts on the design of the business logic and not on the screen size and the frames and the coding of how to display something on a device.”

What other advantages does using a MEAP bring to your business?

Once again, this year’s Mobile World Congress is packed with hundreds of new and innovative mobile products and services with a large and eager crowd keen to catch up on the latest trends and technologies. Indeed, the show illustrates the power of mobility and the impact it has on our lives — at work, at leisure and at home. Being here is truly an experience.

But as I walked the show floor, a thought crossed my mind. Even though MWC appears to be gaining popularity, could it be that over the next few years, the importance and influence of this show might diminish, rather than grow? This hardly seems credible in 2012, but let me draw a parallel with what happened in the world of technology just over a decade ago.

At that time, both enterprises and consumers were starting to really come to terms with the power of the internet and the web. It was a thrilling new world of online opportunities, opening up entirely new ways of working and of interacting, and creating the basis of a new global business model. Shows and conferences sprang up around the world to promote and discuss this Big New Thing.

But over time, online quickly became an integral part of how everything worked – it stopped being its own separate space, along with a collection of exciting niche technologies. Web quickly became central to IT operations. As such, there simply wasn’t the need for standalone, niche shows to cover these technologies. Online strategy became business strategy, and the shows changed to reflect this, incorporating the internet into every aspect of the B2B world.

Remember Internet World?  It was once the largest trade show on e-business and internet technologies. In fact, during Internet World Fall 2000, more than 1,000 companies were on display in a 300,000 sq. ft. Convention center with more than 60,000 attendees (the same as this year’s Mobile World Congress). As the years went on and technology evolved, the internet industry’s flagship event experienced a significant decline in attendance. As broader business technology shows emerged, attending a conference focused solely on e-business tools began to lose its appeal.

I believe that mobility, particularly within the enterprise, may undergo a similar evolution. For too long, the majority of companies have been held hostage by the realities of rolling out enterprise applications onto mobile devices. The process has been laborious and expensive, usually because of the reliance on third party providers to develop and manage mobile apps. As a result, many businesses held off on such projects with the wishful thinking that their employees could get by without mobile access to enterprise data. Today, mobile applications have become a part of our everyday lives and are no longer a separate technology that businesses can afford to live without.

Again, there’s a parallel here with how corporate websites used to be at the mercy of web developers, who controlled the means of creating and updating a company’s online presence, and who charged accordingly. This meant that websites often remained static for long periods of time due to the fact that businesses did not have the in-house expertise to make ongoing updates themselves. Oftentimes changes were saved up over time because of the hassle and expense of making dynamic, ad hoc updates.

It’s exactly the same today, with enterprise mobile app development, where the IT departments are unable to keep up with user demands for improved functionality and availability of new devices and operating systems. But just as IT eventually realized that they had to take control of their own web development, especially with the emergence of web services, so companies are beginning to understand that enterprise mobility is far too important to leave in the hands of third parties.

Mobility is mainstream business and application development needs to reflect this. Increasingly, it’s not just specialized divisions such as sales and field services that need or want to access applications on the move – it’s the entire workforce.

And so, to my original suggestion, perhaps MWC could find itself becoming more marginal over the next few years.  If it happens, it will not signal a reduced emphasis on mobility. Rather, it’ll validate the fact that, like the internet, mobility is rapidly integrating itself into all areas of our lives. A show just dedicated to mobility will seem like the shows that used to ring-fence the internet, before online became synonymous with successful modern business practice.

Mobility is fast approaching that tipping point – no longer an add-on, but the lifeblood that drives the 21^st century enterprise.

What are your predictions for the future of mobile technology conferences?

Steve Levy is the chief executive officer of Verivo.

The right enterprise mobility strategy puts you in a position to better serve your customers. Mobile apps can help customers discover what they need most, in many cases, right at the moment and point of need.

For example, a physical therapist in a health care setting can access ongoing education on a tablet one minute. A minute later, the therapist could walk into the next room and use the same device to pull up a patient record and show the patient how to use a piece of new equipment set to arrive at the clinic in a few days. There is a process of education and discovery unfolding here that could not happen at the same pace without mobility.

In sales of industrial equipment, a sales engineer meeting with a plant manager can pull out a mobile device to build a 3D configuration of a new system for a plant, while also helping the plant manager understand why the current gear is trending higher on a metric like overall equipment effectiveness. Once again, mobile apps are helping a customer pinpoint needs and optimal solutions—at the right time, and the right place.

The best business cases for enterprise mobility often come back to being able to dynamically respond to customer needs. For decades, management theorists such as Peter Drucker stressed the importance of being customer-centric—now mobility lets that happen in a new and more real-time way.

We see these customer-centric innovations everyday from the users of our platform; from mobile apps that help college students set their schedules to mobile apps that let people identify healthy life choices and get health coaching.

Once the business case is identified, mobile strategy involves some technology priorities. Here are four key ones:

• Support for multiple devices and form factors without having to custom-build apps on multiple platforms.
• Speed in development and enhancements. Once users start reaping the benefits of the first few apps, they often come up with great ideas for new apps or enhancements. Configuration-based design gives you speed.
• The ability to integrate with the back end.  Much of the power of enterprise mobility comes from tapping data or analytics resident in back-end systems. Does your platform have the interfaces to handle that?
• Enterprise mobile apps should fit into the mobile ecosystem. This means being able to provide strong app-level security while being able to embrace the bring your own device (BYOD) trend. Since mobile app stores are a vital distribution channel, your strategy should also consider compatibility with app stores.

Technical enablers are important, but at the end of the day, mobility strategies are business strategies. That’s why it’s vital to look at mobility through the lens of the customer.

I am eager to hear from presenters at the Mobile World Congress’ sessions on mobile health on how the customer/patient experience is being transformed by mobile apps. These experts can tell us about these transformations first hand, and point out how user-centric improvements can be applied across industries.

In the meantime ask yourself these questions — do your apps make your internal people more productive while on the go, or bring their expertise closer to the point of use? Do your mobile apps help customers discover what products or services best fit their latest needs? If so, you’ve just created demand in a new, dynamic way. That’s good business.

What are some other mobile business strategies that we’ll see in the near future?

Christopher P. Willis is chief marketing officer at Verivo.

For example, an information technology (IT) manager is alerted of a system outage while at a conference, a service technician checks for nearby inventory while working on a client’s machine, and a human resources manager approves time sheets while waiting for the train. In each case business gets done at the confluence of need and convenience.

As mobility pervades the enterprise, employees and customers reap the benefits. The million dollar question is — how can I achieve results faster, before my competitors pass me by?

With a mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP), companies are empowered to create secure, connected mobile apps quickly and efficiently, allowing IT to focus on end user benefits and overall business value.

There are three technical pillars that can help achieve these goals. These tips offer the compelling combination of speed and control over app development, enabling teams to work with agility throughout the build, deploy, and manage cycles.

Useable, flexible tools

Mobile app development tools must be easy to use and flexible. Visual development tools provide rapid app design and creation, and avoid the thorny challenges of per-platform native coding. The ability to configure the app once, and run it consistently, yet natively on any device is essential. You also must be able to quickly enhance applications once they are deployed.

Both mobile web and configuration-based MEAPs enable rapid, cross-platform change with immediate results for the user. However, while mobile web apps require extensive coding, the best mobile platforms deliver immediate changes including core needs like entitlements, localization, and audit tracking.  Developers see this first pillar as a key to agile software delivery, while business people know it means having that crucial functionality on your smartphone in days, not months.

Server-side integration

While a “snazzy UI” commands most of the attention on mobile projects, the heavy lifting of enterprise mobility is integration with core business systems. Experienced enterprise app developers know that meeting corporate IT requirements for app deployment is difficult. Single sign-on, disparate systems, complex authorization schemes, user enrollment, logging requirements, system monitoring, disaster recovery compliance – the list of IT demands is extensive, and those that underestimate them are either surprised by large, unbudgeted efforts or suffer the pains of a quick project gone awry.

Does your mobile infrastructure account for these demands? Are your tools able to provide secure, bi-directional data access to myriad data structures and authentication schemes?

If “no” or “not sure” come to mind, then a mobile app platform should be on your radar. MEAPs offer a structured set of tools for navigating the complex waters of enterprise data integration. The best platforms allow you to utilize your existing systems and authentication schemes, without the need to rewrite web services or modify your security architecture. Further, they allow you to combine corporate data with public sources like social media, news feeds, and market data to deliver indispensable applications. With a platform to solve the complexities of simple object access protocol (SOAP) and RESTful web services (a services architecture approach that gets its name from the concept of Representational State Transfer, or REST), your teams can focus on providing business gains.

Deployment management

To own your mobility, you must not only be able to build great mobile apps, but also deploy and manage them effectively. Success in this phase starts with simplifying your environment. Replacing code-centric tools with a configuration-based mobile platform reduces engineering staff and eliminates the cost and complexity of multi-platform source control, unit testing, build management, and update distribution. The best mobile platforms also solve challenges in the field like language localization, time zone management, and usage analytics. These core requirements, and many others like them, are often overlooked until late in the project and have brought many mobile teams to their knees with unplanned coding, complexity, and risk.

What other tips do you have to accelerate enterprise mobility?

Todd Christy is the chief technology officer for Verivo Software.

We’re in the mobile era. Apps have become a part of life for many consumers, from the way they shop, to the way they make appointments or pay bills.  In fact, a December 2011 IBM study on holiday shopping trends showed that 14.6 percent of online sessions on retailer sites started from a mobile device, more than double the previous rate of 5.6 percent. Sales from mobile devices also doubled, reaching 11 percent versus 5.5 percent in December 2010.

Whether it’s the holiday season or not, companies must have mobile apps to support their sales and business strategies.

If you are a marketing professional, you want to make your mark with enterprise mobile apps, offer value, and make your apps “sticky”, i.e. an app that people find valuable enough to use frequently, in some cases, every day.

How do you Build Effective Apps?

Here are some tips on building mobile apps to drive greater effectiveness:

Think of apps as landing pages, vs. web sites.

Don’t pack too much content or too many interactive pieces into one big app. Instead, build apps like you would build a campaign landing page, with a single call to action.  It’s much better to build mobile applications to support individual products, services, or events that you want to promote. Think targeted campaigns—not mega apps.

Keep distribution channels in mind.

Marketing-oriented apps should be designed to go viral, which means the apps must be compatible with the mass-market app stores. That means building native apps or apps developed specifically for use on a particular device. “But what about this HTML5 I keep hearing about?” Well, there are plenty of challenges with HTML5, one being the lack of a clear and recognized distribution channel. Users today expect their apps to show up in the What’s Hot list in the App Store. That requires that you build native apps that can be distributed via the mass-market app stores (Android Market, iTunes App Store, BlackBerry App World).  Or you can use an enterprise mobility platform that can efficiently generate apps and have them ready for distribution.

Build apps that people will use frequently. 

If you’re an insurance company, it makes sense to build a claims app, mostly as a requirement for your business. However, most users will only use that app once every few years at best.  Instead, build a single feature app that simplifies daily or monthly tasks. For example, one of our customers added “bill pay” to their claims app. Now users open that app every month like clockwork. That same insurance company’s marketing department released an app that had nothing to do with insurance. It’s an app that easily connects young drivers with their parents via short message service and global positioning technology. No sales pitch. Just pure user value and branding.

Listen to user feedback and adjust accordingly.

When you pay a company to build an app for you, that app really represents a moment in time—the time when you determined the requirements—which may have been a year ago. That app, possibly with obsolete functionality, will stay that way until you again pay a developer to make changes. However, if you leverage a mobile enterprise application platform you can focus on content rather than coding, easily making changes as necessary without third party assistance. In fact, you can design a feature today and update it tomorrow, across multiple devices. Most users download an app and use it once. If you can add content and features based on their feedback, you raise your stickiness.

The bottom line is that when you build mobile apps, you want them to be focused on solving specific customer concerns. From a practical standpoint, you also need to be able to get your apps out to the broadest market, and have a platform nimble enough to adjust to changing customer needs. The real focus, however, must center on customer needs, which is why marketing people should be a driving force behind B2C mobile app development.

What other tips would you add to this list?

Christopher P. Willis is chief marketing officer at Verivo.

These points are reiterated in the book, This Time Is Different, where authors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff recount numerous financial crises over the past 800 years. For each crisis, the experts of the day thought their crisis was fundamentally different and that old rules of valuation and solutions did not apply to their situation. In effect, these experts failed to recognize impending disruptions.

Living in the world of technology, I can’t help but draw parallels. As in the financial markets, information technology (IT) organizations have overlooked the onset of major tech shifts before.

Picture the time when IT organizations were riding the wave of client-server development and saw websites as a niche technology. IT did not take ownership of their web initiatives then and often outsourced departmental projects to third-party vendors who understood the technology. Rather than developing a deep understanding of this technology and the capability to create websites themselves, businesses constantly relied on outside experts, and found themselves unable to keep up with their organization’s rapidly changing needs.

As websites evolved to web-based apps, capable of transactions and business process support, IT recognized the advantages, including the ability to deliver an application on any desktop, regardless of the operating system.

Today, web development is central to IT strategy and the paradigm for application development.  Businesses use the web to test new ideas and deliver new capabilities to drive competitive advantage as well as create, deploy, and maintain applications for employees and customers.

Enterprise mobility is today’s business driver

Companies should not think of mobile apps as niche technology. Mobile devices are enabling employees to interact with customers and stay connected to critical business data from wherever they are, thus driving an increase in productivity, internal efficiencies, and customer satisfaction. Therefore, enterprises should embrace this technology and drive adoption, while keeping in mind that the mobile device market is highly fragmented and users – from customers to employees – will demand access to their enterprise apps from a range of mobile devices.

A Gartner 2011 report states that the combined sales of smart phones and tablets will be 44 percent bigger than the PC market. The analyst firm also predicts that 31 billion mobile apps will be downloaded in 2012, up from 18 billion apps in 2011.

What do these stats mean for the thousands of global businesses who have yet to implement mobility into their organization?

Mobile apps are here to stay and a smart enterprise mobility strategy is necessary to boost competitive edge and increase market share. In talking to customers, we see rapid adoption of targeted mobile apps by departments or business units. We see IT teams yearning for more efficient development tools that free them from writing code for each mobile platform. 

Take control. Drive competitive advantage.

To help a company be more successful, the corporate IT team should utilize technology that enables them to take control of their mobile initiatives and bring these capabilities in-house.  IT leadership should understand the benefits and inherent challenges of the technology, plot a course for its use, decide on what to try, what to experiment with, and what to build. Teams must have an understanding of the technology, a plan for its use, and the ability to act without going through an intermediary.

By leveraging the technology that allows you to take ownership of your corporate mobile initiatives, you can:

• simplify app development, deploy simultaneously across multiple devices, and reduce costs.
• make ongoing changes so that apps are always up-to-date with latest features, functionality, and data to meet market demands and drive business adaptability.
• align mobile apps with rapidly changing business requirements, market needs and IT deliverables.
• interact better with customers and appeal to the new generation of consumers.
• make employees more productive, efficient, and responsive.

These benefits are broad and far reaching, and impact a business beyond the needs of any one department or unit. In recognizing this, IT can see that mobile applications are much more than just a niche technology.

So, learn from the past. See what’s coming and recognize that your ability to take advantage of a new technology will depend on your willingness to embrace it.

Mobile technology is the next wave. Own it and make a difference.

Do you agree?

Steve Levy is the chief executive officer of Verivo.

The name Verivo is a combination of two Latin words: veritas and volo. Veritas means truth and Volo means flight.

As a mobility company, Verivo or true flight is an apt name as it underscores our focus on empowering our customers and accelerating their business results.

The multifaceted Verivo logo, designed to depict a bird in flight, represents our corporate philosophy and global presence.

Like the bird, we are nimble and respond quickly to changing market and customer demands, worldwide. The customers are in control of their mobility — they build their own apps on our platform, without being tethered to our team.

Why the transition?

The decision to transform Pyxis Mobile to Verivo Software started several months ago, under the leadership of CEO Steven Levy. The strategy was to build on Pyxis Mobile’s success and start a new software company, with expanded business model, product line and management team.

And to appropriately reflect the company’s new focus and global initiatives, the team decided to launch the company as Verivo – the enterprise mobility company.

As for the logo, it’s definitely a topic of conversation. Some say it’s an eagle in flight. Others see acceleration.

What do you see?

Parna Sarkar-Basu is vice president of Marketing Communications for Verivo.

Mobile devices and operating systems have evolved rapidly over the past few years, setting a high bar for new apps. Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about the best solutions for achieving your mobile initiatives.

But don’t worry. We’ve identified the top five myths to help you make all the right mobile moves.

Myth: You need an entire team of developers to build a native app.

Reality: I agree that writing code for each operating system and for every device is labor-intensive. However, companies can use available enterprise mobile platform to develop native apps centrally and deploy across multiple devices.

Myth: If you want cross-platform support, you need to build an app for each device.

Reality: Building apps from scratch for each operating system is a major project. Instead, use the “configure once, run anywhere” strategy. Using a mobile platform is cost-effective and reduces the amount of manpower needed to build cross-platform native apps to just one person. Depending on the complexity of the app, you can build and deploy apps for each platform in just two to ten weeks.

Myth: Web-based apps provide the same user experience as native apps.

Reality: Some people think HTML5 is a magic bullet. While HTML5 in an important new technology, its ability to support native mobile capabilities is narrow. Native applications can provide customized user experiences. They integrate with native device features like GPS, accelerometer and camera. Make sure your mobile development platform enables offline data storage and allows you to build intuitive, rich native apps that integrate with the device operating system and hardware.

Myth: Once you build an app, it can’t be changed.

Reality: Use mobile development platforms with the ability to make real-time changes. You can skip the recoding, recompilation, regression testing, and resubmission to the App Store. The agility and flexibility associated with such solutions is essential to companies who aim to grow and evolve, allowing you to add new features and tweaks that keep users involved and satisfied.

Myth: If you want to build an app for your company, you need to pay per app and per user.

Reality: Building cross-platform apps shouldn’t cost a fortune, and now it doesn’t have to. Find a mobile development solution with a pricing model that scales with your mobility needs. The platform price should align with the number of CPUs you need to run those apps rather than paying per app or per user. That way, you have total control of your mobile strategy, giving you the ability to build as many apps, on as many devices, for as many users as you want.

Let us know what else you’ve heard about mobile app development and we’ll separate fact from fiction. 

Christopher P. Willis is chief marketing officer at Verivo.